A Ghostly Father Sets Off a Cascade of Memories

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Ron Crawford, right, plays a father who doesn’t disappear from his children’s lives after he dies in “For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday,” with Kathleen Chalfant as his oldest daughter.CreditCreditJoan Marcus

The grown-up kids have gathered at their childhood home, where a white-haired man is puttering around behind them. His name is George, and he is their dad. Just a little bit ago, in the first scene of Sarah Ruhl’s play “For Peter Pan on her 70th birthday,” we watched him die in a hospital bed. Then he sat up, swung his legs over the side and walked away unnoticed, a freshly minted ghost.

Now, at the house, his children still can’t tell he’s there, which is all right with George. He has his grapefruit to eat, and the family dog, who is also dead, to keep him company.

When I saw “For Peter Pan” at Playwrights Horizons, where it wraps up its run on Sunday, Oct. 1, these were the characters I couldn’t take my eyes off: the ghost dog because dogs onstage are automatically riveting, the ghost man because he reminded me of my own dad, also named George, who died on the last day of summer two years ago.

The play, which Ms. Ruhl wrote for her mother, is less about George than about his firstborn, Ann, and her siblings. Yet it is also in a sense a father-daughter play, about getting one last chance to be in the presence of a parent who isn’t around anymore. In my mind it is twinned with “Eurydice,” Ms. Ruhl’s devastatingly poignant adaptation of the Orpheus myth, in which a young woman prematurely follows her dead father into the underworld. The playwright dedicated that one to her own father, who died when she was in college.

“When a beloved person dies, a whole world dies with that person,” Ms. Ruhl wrote in a piece called “Theater as a preparation for death,” included in her collection “100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write” from 2014. “A world of relation — of not knowing how the beloved will respond. What is left is memory — knowing how the beloved did respond.”

On ‘Being Mortal’

On my father’s last Christmas, in 2014, I got him a book that it turned out he already had. When I asked if I could exchange it for something he wanted, he named a new title he’d just read about, Atul Gawande’s “Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End.”

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Charles Shaw Robinson and Maria Dizzia as father and daughter in Sarah Ruhl’s “Eurydice.”CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

For my dad, a retired doctor being slowly killed by Parkinson’s disease, this was a perfect match: a physician author’s book about dying, and about what makes a worthwhile existence even as your life is coming to a close.

My dad loved “Being Mortal,” and urged me to read it. I stayed away from it as if it were kryptonite. Never did it occur to me that it might tell me something about my father’s experience that would be valuable to know while he was still here — that I would regret not knowing when he was gone.

It was only a few weeks ago, after I realized that the paperback was staring me down every time I popped into my favorite bookstore, that I finally screwed up my courage, got a copy for myself and dived in. It was slow going, mainly because of the flashbacks. They were most powerful where Dr. Gawande writes about the excruciating decline of his own father, also a doctor, who was taken aback, just as my dad was, when his body turned on him.

I hear my father’s voice in my head all the time. In any number of situations, I know exactly what he would say, which (possibly off-color) joke he would crack. But all the questions that “Being Mortal” sparked in me — I don’t know what he’d have answered to them. I completely blew my chance to ask.

‘Tell Me a Story’

“Tell me a story of when you were little,” Eurydice says to her father, and he complies with tale after tale.

“There was something I always wanted to ask you,” she says then. “A story — or someone’s name — I forget.”

There isn’t, but that’s always the fantasy: that we can hang on forever to the people we love, keep tapping their memories. When they die, one of the first ways we know to grieve is to tell stories about them, as Ann and her siblings do in “For Peter Pan.”

Their father, by the way, is listed in the program as The Father. In the version of the script I have, though, Ms. Ruhl calls him George. That’s the name I prefer for him, this benevolent specter she has contributed to the canon of stage ghosts.

One of the best known of them is Hamlet’s murdered father, and much has been made of the grief of his son. Daughters mourning their fathers are less present in our plays; Ophelia, also in “Hamlet,” is often written off as merely nuts. But Shakespeare gave us Cordelia, too — King Lear’s daughter, who grieves for her living father when she sees how diminished he has become.

A decade or so ago, my dad went to a production of “King Lear” by himself. When he told me this, I found it unbearably moving. It wasn’t like him to go to the theater solo, but his wife was busy and he really wanted to see the play. He was only in his 60s then, but Parkinson’s was aging him fast. Ever since, every “Lear” I go to, I see my father in that poor ravaged king.

As much as I avoided “Being Mortal,” though, I don’t stay away from “Lear.” Theater is where I go to confront the hard stuff; to have my heart shredded there is O.K. The reason, I think, is something Ms. Ruhl gets at in another essay.

“Theater in its most basic form is a kind of reading aloud,” she notes, adding that grown-ups customarily take in the written word silently and alone. “In the theater, we ask adults to be children again, to sit in a circle and be read to.”

I believe there is safety in that circle — solace in the company of other people that makes it all right for ghosts to enter the room, and our grief to well up inside us.

“Didn’t you already mourn for your father, young lady?” a heartless creature asks Eurydice, but that of course is beside the point. She has mourned her dead father and she mourns him still, and she will mourn him until memory stops.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR6 of the New York edition with the headline: A Ghostly Father Brings On the Memories. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe